Criminal Law and Criminalization: A Response to Critics

First paragraph: I am very grateful to my four commentators, Vincent Chiao, Shachar Eldar, Miri Gur-Arye, and Re’em Segev, for their constructively critical responses to my book.1 I cannot do justice to all their comments here, but will tackle (what I take to be) their most significant criticisms. Their papers bring out some of the ways in which I failed to make my arguments clear enough—and ways in which my own thinking was not clear enough; they also helpfully indicate ways in which the ideas in the book could be further developed: but they do not (I hope, and will argue) threaten the main claims that the book seeks to sustain. In what follows I will first give a brief account of the book’s aims and its main themes, in Section 1, and will then respond to each of the commentators: to Segev, who offers the most radical critique, in Section 2; to Chiao, who is mainly concerned with the relationship between political theory and criminal law, in Section 3; to Gur-Arye, who argues that a proper attention to human rights should lead to significant revisions in my account of criminal law’s addressees, in Section 4; and to Eldar, who suggests that the logical structure of deliberations towards criminalization decisions that I propose needs to be complicated and revised, in Section 5